An Integrative Mental Skills Training System for Peak Performance in Learning for primary, secondary, and tertiary students

Research Investigators

An Integrative Mental Skills Training System for Peak Performance in Learning for primary, secondary, and tertiary students

Project Number
NRF2015_SOL001_005

Project Duration
December 2015 - November 2016

Status
Completed

Abstract
Singapore is a small nation with scarce human resource, yet we have achieved much in the first 50 years of nation-building through the collective efforts of our people. To this end, education has been an important contributing factor. However, the high level of mental stress and demands placed on students to excel in highly-staked assessments, if not successfully coped with, can undermine interests for learning and performance during examinations. The consequence of unchecked stress among students today could become a limiting factor for Singapores continued growth in the future if our next generation fails to be maximally developed and harnessed as a whole. To this end, we propose that the mental skills training approach adopted to train elite athletes once redeveloped and implemented for the academic context can be particularly useful for helping Singaporean students to alleviate stress in learning and assessment. The objectives of the planning grant is to review the existing literature in mental skills training currently applied in sport and academic settings, and to identify the effectiveness and mechanisms by which it works in enhancing effective learning and academic performance. Through the review of the literature, specific hypotheses will be formulated and studies will be designed in the main proposal to gather evidence from neuroscience, psychological and physiological indicators. Practical strategies will be designed and tested in consultation with the interdisciplinary team with the aim of creating platform technologies as tools to scale up the interventions. In the final phase of the main proposal, the project team will develop an integrated platform to support the scaling of the interventions to selected schools to evaluate its longer term effectiveness. Ideally, the mental skills programmes can be customised into 3 levels; basic, intermediate, and advanced for primary, secondary, and tertiary students, respectively.